


Hey, Clint

by resonae



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 11:43:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/836506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resonae/pseuds/resonae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The five times that Tony asked Clint out, and the one time Clint said yes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hey, Clint

i.

 

The first time Tony does it, it’s kind of on the high of we-just-saved-the-world. Barton is in the medical van with him, face down on a cot getting countless glass shards out of his back, and he’s being treated for general shock and just-came-back-from-the-dead thing. “Hey,” he says to Barton, who creaks open an eye. “We should date.”

 

Hill, who happens to be in the van with them to watch over them, snorts in derision. Admittedly, it’s not his smoothest pick-up line, but his head is bogged with painkillers. And so is Barton’s. Barton laughs shortly and closes his eyes again. It’s silence after that except Hill’s rhythmical tapping into some kind of tablet (Tony’ll probably provide her with a StarkPad later so she doesn’t have to deal with some ancient shit, but that’s for when his brain is less foggy).

 

“I’m hot, you’re hot. We just saved the world. We should totally date.”

 

Barton creaks open an eye again. “ _You_ just saved the world.” He says, and really, that’s far too modest, because Tony’s pretty sure there’s a big pile of alien bodies that’s all by Barton. Not to mention Barton was the one who provided him with a lot of the intel for Tony’s alien-dead-body-pile. “And that logic doesn’t work anyway.”

 

“You’re really clear-headed for someone bogged on painkillers.” Tony complains.

 

“You’re not too bad yourself.” Barton responds, closing his eyes again. “Now shut up.”

 

Tony obliges, but only because the painkillers are really starting to work and he’s getting sleepy. “At least tell me you’re going to come live at the tower.”

 

He thinks Barton says yes, but he doesn’t really hear it because he’s falling asleep.

 

\--

 

ii.

 

The second time he does it is when he’s wandering about the tower at night because he consumed too much caffeine during the stupid board meeting that Pepper made him attend. “Is anyone even awake right now, JARVIS?”

 

“ _Actually, sir, Agent Barton is in the range._ ”

 

Huh. He sips his milk (Pepper told him once it’d help him sleep, not that it was doing much so far).

He stares at it, thinks for a while, and pours himself another mug. He finds Barton in the big range, shooting arrows one by one into the bull’s eye. Tony knows that the range can get incredibly difficult with random, erratic movements that can’t be predicted. Targets jerk left to right, up and down, disappear, appear all of a sudden, and even turn around completely, yet there’s not a single arrow in sight that’s not lodged in dead-center.

 

Tony watches in disbelief as Barton releases an arrow at a target and it jerks away. Barton pulls another arrow, fires it in seconds, hitting the first arrow off its original course into the bull’s eye and managing to hit a bull’s eye on another target with the second arrow. “That’s impressive.” He whistles. “I’d ask how you managed to calculate the amount of force you needed to get the second arrow to go faster and the exact angle you shot it to hit two arrows in to different bull’s eye, but I’m going to guess that it’s completely instinct.”

 

Barton smiles at him. “I did that one to show off.” Barton admits. “I know how all the targets move. You need to reprogram.”

 

Tony stares. “ _What_? The targets move randomly based on a random string of numbers generated by the computer. There’s no way that you can know where the targets are gonna go.”

 

Barton quirks an eyebrow. He draws his arrow without a word, and in the next thirty seconds proceeds to shoot thirty arrows directly into bull’s eye, shooting at nothing at first and watching the targets jerk its way into the arrow’s course. “Nothing that a computer does is random, Stark. You probably know that best.”

 

Tony hands the coffee mug to Barton and Barton takes it. “Yeah, but there are millions of permutations. No one can calculate them in an instant. Not even the best supercomputer.” Barton was smiling at him over his mug. “You’re going to tell me it’s instinct.”

 

“Listen, Stark.” Clint held the tip of the arrow to Tony’s chestplate and tapped it. “We’re similar. You had to make that and a suit because your life depended on it. Me, I had to learn all this because it was beat into me. Neither of us had a choice. And when humans have no choice, we learn things pretty quickly. Pain and the threat of death is a pretty big incentive.”

 

And because Tony knows exactly what that feels like, he nods. He tries not to imagine a teenage Barton, being beat to the brink of death because he couldn’t shoot an arrow into the bull’s eye. He instead watches Barton shoot arrow after arrow into the direct center of the dancing targets.

 

He’s so impressed, really, that it happens without him really realizing. “You sure you don’t want to date me?”

 

Barton snickers and sips on his mug of milk. “You remember that? That’s impressive.” He puts the mug down. “I didn’t think you were lucid enough to remember.”

 

“Well, the offer still stands.” Tony offers Barton a smirk, and Barton smirks right back.

 

“Once you stop your little dance with Miss Potts, I’ll consider it.”

 

\--

 

iii.

 

The third time is when Tony really gets to know Barton a little more. Romanoff (who’s now become Natasha, really) and Bruce have taken Rogers (who is starting to grudgingly become Steve) and Thor out for a little city-tour, so it’s only him and Barton (who is still in Barton territory) in the tower.

 

“Drink?” Tony offers when Barton comes down into the common area, toweling his hair dry.

 

Barton grins. “I don’t drink unless required by a mission.”

 

Tony throws his hands up into the air. “Steve doesn’t drink because he can’t get drunk anyway and Bruce doesn’t drink because he Hulks out easier when he’s drunk. Natasha is _Russian_ , meaning she can drink me under the table anytime, and Thor is a god, which apparently means the same thing. You’re the really the only normal guy I can drink with, and you don’t drink? How come?”

 

Barton pours himself a cup of water instead and sits at the bar, flashing a toothy grin at Tony. “Alcoholic, abusive father.”

 

Oh. Fuck.

 

Tony winces, wishing suddenly Natasha might have mentioned that before. Barton shrugs. “Don’t worry about it. It was a long time ago, and he’s long dead. Drove drunk with my mom in the passenger’s seat.” Tony flinches. The story’s just getting worse. “Uh.. I’m not actually making you feel better, huh. Anyway, don’t worry about it. I just don’t like how it tastes, really. I can keep you company while you drink, though.” He raises his glass of water, downing it after clinking Tony’s class of wine.

 

“I’ve got a better solution.” Tony suggests instead, pulling out his StarkPad and drawing his wine cellar up. “JARVIS, get me the non-alcoholic champagne.” When Barton raises an eyebrow, Tony grins. “It’s really good. I tried it once and then had it stored for when I had someone over who couldn’t drink. You’re not exactly a guest, but, hell, why not.”

 

Barton grins as Tony pours him a glass, and sips at it as if to test it first. They start talking, from Tony’s research (which Barton keeps up surprisingly well with) to techniques of shooting (which Tony can understand because at the basics it’s all physics). Tony doesn’t know when it starts, but suddenly he’s telling Barton about his relationship with his father that wasn’t exactly repaired until after his father had passed away and he’d stumbled onto the video.

 

Barton sips on his (non-alcoholic) champagne and nods. “That’s good. Kind of a catharsis.”

 

Tony nods. “You ever have a father figure?”

 

Barton hesitates for a second. “I did. I think. Someone who I… kind of thought of as one.” Barton hesitates again and throws Tony a crooked grin. “Coulson.” Tony winces inside. This conversation isn’t going anywhere he was hoping it would go. “Fury, too, I guess. They were always looking out for me. Fury still is. Just.. I dunno.” Barton smiles into his champagne glass.

 

They stay in silence for a while, and the only thing Tony can offer at the end of it is, “He was my babysitter for a while.”

 

Barton chuckles. “Yeah, he told me when I saw him in New Mexico. He was picking Thor up there, if you didn’t figure it out already. Did you know he knocked two gas station robbers unconscious with a bag of flour on the way? I was asleep in the back of the car and I missed the entire thing.”

 

There’s silence again. Tony sips on his glass again and clears his throat. “I could be your father figure-thing. Or we could date.”

 

Barton snickers. “You want to be my father figure _and_ my boyfriend? You’ve got a daddy fetish or something?”

 

“Well, now that you mention it…”

 

The spend the rest of the evening snickering over jokes and watching bad movies, and Tony counts it as crisis averted.

 

\--

 

iv.

 

The fourth time is when Coulson is back.

 

Tony himself is still trying to wrap his head around how Coulson and Fury (and later on, Hill) had played them all, but he still understands the shock Clint (no longer Barton) must feel. The arrows go clattering out of Clint’s grip when their usual black van comes around to pick them up, the doors open, and it’s Coulson waiting for them.

 

Tony stares. Steve stares. Natasha stares. Bruce (de-Hulked) stares. Thor stares. Clint’s bow joins his arrows on the ground – and then he does.

 

Tony doesn’t see Clint wake up in Medical because according to the nurses, he escaped. Coulson sighs, rubs his temple and turns to Tony. “He’s probably heading back to the tower as we speak.”

 

“I don’t think you should try to see him today,” Natasha snaps, obviously still pissed. “He’s not going to take it well.”

 

It was mostly Fury’s decision in the beginning so the Avengers had a kind of push, and the Coulson had stayed under wraps while he healed. Tony finds Clint in the range, arrows shot at everywhere but the dead center, the remaining strewn around on the floor, and the archer himself tucked away in the corner, knees drawn close and his face buried in his arms. Tony sits beside him, silent. He thinks he can make out sniffling, but doesn’t say anything about it.

 

“Would this be a bad time to ask you out again?” Tony tries.

 

It gets a watery laugh out from beneath folded arms. Clint rubs his face on his arms before looking up – he’s definitely been crying. “You could hold me,” he suggests, and Tony does, awkwardly because Clint is a tight ball that won’t yield yet. But a soon after, Clint relaxes, sighing. “What’s with you asking me out, anyway? Are you serious about it?”

 

Tony shrugs. “Yeah? Kind of? And not really? If you said yes I’d be happy, but even if you say no I wouldn’t be crushed. Made you feel better, though, right?” Clint snorts and drops his head again, but he’s not hiding beneath his arms this time. It’s a few minutes after that when Clint’s rocking slightly that Tony realizes he’s asleep. “Clint Barton.” Tony laughs. “You are officially the first person _ever_ to fall asleep in my presence.”

 

He waits, his arms tucked securely around Clint, until Natasha steps into the range. She gives both of them a look, mutters something Tony can’t quite make out, and starts picking up Clint’s arrows. “I punched Coulson in the face.” Tony raises an eyebrow. “All right, he let me punch him in the face. Whatever. It made me feel better.” Natasha walks over to the end of the range and plucks out the arrows one by one even though both of them know JARVIS can do it.

 

She brings the arrows to Clint’s side and squats in front of him. She raises her hand, hesitates for a second, and snaps her fingers loudly in front of him. Clint doesn’t stir. She looks satisfied. “He must trust you a lot, if he’s letting himself fall so deeply asleep like this.”

 

“I’ve asked him out four times already.”

 

“Rejected, I suppose, then.” Natasha looks amused as she stands up. “Keep at it. His walls are coming down.”

 

\--

 

v.

 

The fifth time is well after the Coulson fiasco, and Natasha is suddenly screaming into the comms, [ _SOMEONE CATCH HAWKEYE!_ ].

 

Tony looks up and his heart drops into his stomach when he sees Clint falling off his high perch and he’s _not_ shooting his grappling arrow like he usually does when he falls off said high places. “JARVIS, full power to the thrusters.” He’s flying at his highest speed, _hoping, hoping, hoping_ , and he manages to slow down enough so he doesn’t collide into Clint at full speed.

 

Still, the impact is pretty hard, and the good thing is Clint is unconscious, so he doesn’t really feel it. The bad thing is Clint is unconscious. And bleeding from a nasty gash to the head. “Full-body scan, JARVIS.” He lands next to Steve, who’s run over in worry.

 

“ _Already finished, sir. He’s showing signs of light concussion. He seems to have lost consciousness from the poison that’s-_ “

 

“Poison?” Steve and Tony chorus at the same exact time.

 

“ _Please let me finish, sirs._ ” JARVIS sounds peeved. Not that JARVIS can be peeved. Anyway. “ _It’s very, very weak carbon monoxide poisoning, and he’ll be showing symptoms of headache, nausea, and fatigue when he wakes, but nothing that can’t be cured with rest_. _”_

“So someone released carbon monoxide up where he was and then one-upped him.” Tony growls.

 

“ _That would seem to be the likely theory, sir_.”

 

Steve sighs. “Great. Black Widow, we need a thorough combover of-“

 

[ _I already got him._ ] Coulson cuts in drily. [ _SHIELD agents were already tracking any movement in the building the moment Hawkeye fell off unconscious from his perch. Iron Man, get Hawkeye to medical._ ]

 

Clint wakes up many hours on painkillers, looking drowsy and high. An uncoordinated Clint Barton is something the rest of the Avengers have yet to see, and Natasha looks slightly worried. “They must have pumped you full of painkillers, huh?” Bruce says when Clint drops the apple that Steve cut up for everyone for the fifth time. Tony stabs it with his fork and holds it for Clint to eat.

 

“Shuddap.” It’s also the first time they’d ever seen Clint slur his words, and Tony finds it kind of endearing. Clint looks like a petulant kid with his head bandaged as he munches grumpily on the apple. Thankfully, Clint was sturdy enough to not be nauseous or weak when he woke up – the only thing was that, as he described, like Thor and the Hulk were having a wrecking party inside his head.

 

The headache was apparently enough to keep him docile and pliant, and he wasn’t making any complains as Tony had him tucked into his side. He was glaring blearily at the movie that was playing (Natasha had chosen the newest Bourne movie) as if he was blaming the movie for his unsteadiness. “I’m going to sleep.” He announced halfway into the movie.

 

Exactly three seconds later, he was leaning onto Tony, breathing completely even. “He’s asleep,” Tony announced. “That was really fast.”

 

Bruce came up to feel Clint’s forehead. “The painkillers at work. Maybe we should carry him back to bed.” Thor does, and in a way Tony thinks he feels bad about Clint’s comment of them having a wrecking party in his head. Tony and Thor tuck Clint into bed, but Clint mumbles and his hand catches onto Tony’s wrist.

 

Thor looks amused. “It looks like he wants you to stay.”

 

“Yeah, guess he does.” Tony sits at the edge of the bed and Thor pats his shoulder before he leaves. It’s not until the elevator _dings_ that Clint flops over. “You’re awake.” Tony notes.

 

“Movie was too borin’.” Clint’s still slurring, and his eyes are half-open. Tony rolls his eyes and says nothing else, just sits by Clint’s bed. “How come you don’t ask me out anymore?”

 

Tony stares, but Clint’s already out, his grip on Tony’s wrist loosening. After a while, Tony can’t help but grin and he bends low to whisper, “Hey Clint, wanna date?”

 

\--

 

+1

 

After the Clint-high-on-painkillers incident, the pair of them pretty much is a couple. They go on movie dates, Tony catches Clint a billion times (after a certain point Tony thinks Clint’s doing it on purpose), and they play footsie under the table during dinner time. _Footsie_. Tony’s pretty sure they’re dating.

 

And the world is great. Sure, there are alien invasions too often for Tony’s tastes that take them all over the world twice every week, and sometimes one of them (it’s usually Clint or Natasha because for _some reason they won’t wear protective battle suits_ ) gets badly hurt, but in the end everything is containable. The biggest threat in their lives is actually Steve trying to work an appliance in the kitchen and ending up setting off the sprinklers in the entire building.  

 

Of _course_ it wouldn’t last. It really happens out of nowhere, when Clint is in the kitchen digging the fridge for something to eat. Tony doesn’t even hear the soft _thump_ of his body hitting the tile over _Fast and Furious 6_. No one does until JARVIS announces, “ _Agent Barton has lost consciousness in the kitchen_.”

 

That gets Tony running. He skids over the tiles to see Clint limp on the floor and he grips Clint and starts shaking him around. “JARVIS! What’s wrong with him?”

 

“ _Brain scans show irregular brain activities, sir. It’s almost as if he’s having a nightmare-_ ”

 

“Tony, drop Clint. Now!” Natasha shouts, and Tony is so surprised that he does – and the moment he does, Clint’s arms come up and his fist swings in the air. Clint leaps onto his feet and leaps back, his body crouched in a battle position.

 

His eyes are an unnatural, icy blue. “Oh, no way.” Tony hisses. “This can’t be happening.”

 

Thor is unnaturally stiff beside him. “It cannot be.” He sounds almost desperate. “My father would have let me know at once if either Loki or the staff had gone missing.”

 

“Are you sure?” Bruce’s voice is low, and all of them are staring wide-eyed. “I thought you couldn’t really communicate or travel between your world and here now.”

 

Thor nods. “He is _my father_. He can travel back and forth if he wants. He has assured me that he would let me know immediately.”

And then suddenly Clint’s eyes go dark black. He staggers a little, whimpers, and Tony steps forward, hesitantly. “Hey.” He tries, and feeling Natasha crouch into her own ready-stance makes him feel better a little. If Clint leaps out at him, Natasha would be there first to block the attack. “Clint, it’s us.”

 

Clint’s a little awkward in his crouch now, like someone kicked a leg out. He blinks twice, rapidly, and then whimpers again. “…Tony?” He whispers, and Tony takes that cue to slide forward to catch Clint as he falls.

 

Clint’s body temperature starts spiking to 103 and then dropping down to 95 and then fluctuating back up and down. “That _can’t_ be good for him.” Steve says desperately when the temperature reading that Bruce set up starts dropping again. “What’s happening?”

 

“I don’t know.” Tony grits his teeth. “But it’s obvious that it’s Loki related.”

 

Thor looks helplessly lost. “If Loki was doing anything at all-“

 

“Your father would tell you. I got that.” Tony snaps, and then stops. “Fuck. Thor, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to – just – fuck. Could it be that it’s some kind of leftover magic? Or maybe Loki’s thinking really hard about Clint, or something.”

 

Thor nods slowly. “It is entirely possible. I could… I should go back and check.”

 

“Yeah, but can you come back?” Natasha asks from her post near Clint’s bed. When Thor looks unsure, Natasha shakes her head. “Let’s leave that for last, then.”

 

Bruce sighs, and it sounds like something of a relief, so Tony looks up. “Tony, look. I don’t think it’s anything Loki’s doing.” Bruce points to the screen. For the others, he explains, “JARVIS has security feeds of all of us when we’re in the common area, and anywhere below floor 15. Look – dating all the way back to our battle with Loki. See that blue? I programmed JARVIS to recognize any kind of radiation and electromagnetic waves that were the same as the tesseract when I studied it. It’s not around Loki – just around the staff that Natasha was holding… and you’ll also notice, around Clint. But the amount decreases more and more as time passes – you can’t really tell by eye day by day, but compare five months ago and yesterday. JARVIS, can you show us Clint side by side of the two days?”

 

“It’s like radiation.” Tony says, when he sees the difference. Clint from yesterday has barely any blue – it’s a faint, thin layer that they can only see when JARVIS zooms in. “Half-life.”

 

Bruce nods. “Similar, but a little different. Look. JARVIS, show us the plot of the amount of radiation.” JARVIS pulls up a steeply downward sloping graph. “Tony, as you know, half-life graphs are hyperbolic. They don’t exactly go down in a straight line, and in the end they never disappear fully. But this one, the radiation slops straight down. It’s a continuous downward slope. And from the calculations, it’s all supposed to disappear today.”

 

“So why’s he like this?” Natasha demands.

 

Thankfully, Bruce has an answer. “This is why.” He pulls up a screen of a live-feed of Clint. “See the blue? Every time they flicker back, Clint’s temperature drops. And then they stagger out, making Clint’s temperature rise again. But the time periods where the blue is present is getting shorter and shorter, and the time in between’s getting longer and longer.”

 

Steve stares at the graph and nods slowly. “It’s kind of like its last struggle. Should we be worried? About the fever, or anything else?”

 

“No. The only explanation of the fever I can think of is that his body’s trying to flush the rest of the Loki-energy out of his system. But thankfully, Clint’s very healthy. I suspect he’ll be exhausted and very hungry when he wakes up, but that’s about it. All we can do right now is stay by his side and pat him down with a cool towel when his fever gets too high.” Bruce smiles reassuringly at all of them.

 

The sigh of relief isn’t from just Tony – it’s from Thor as well. Steve pats Thor on the shoulder, and Thor laughs. “I confess, I have never been so nervous before.” Thor booms. “That has made me hungry.”

 

Natasha breaks out into laughter, too. “Yeah, me too. Let’s go get something to eat. I’m sure Tony wants some alone time with Clint, anyway.” Steve and Bruce chuckle when Tony settles down next to Clint’s bed. “Want us to pick something up when we’re back?”

 

“Some of whatever you guys are eating sounds good.” Tony says, picking up the cooled towel to pat across Clint’s forehead. The one-and-a-half hours that the rest of the Avengers spend eating out passes uneventfully. Most of Clint’s temperature fluctuations have settled, and for the most part the pained scrunch in Clint’s forehead has also smoothed out. Tony and Bruce are of course still tracking everything to make sure nothing goes awry, and Tony’s slurping down the take-out noodles that Natasha had dropped onto his lap.

 

At one point, he’s so focused on the noodles (the adrenaline dropping after he found out Clint was safe has made him incredibly hungry) that he almost jumps out of his skin when someone who’s definitely not Bruce goes, “That smells good. I’m hungry.” He looks up to find Clint propping himself on his elbows.

 

His eyes go directly to the scans – the levels have reached complete 0, and his temperature’s evened out. Clint has a tiny bit of a fever, but that’s to be expected. “I’m hungry.” Clint repeats, holding his hand out. Tony’s so relieved that he starts laughing, and Clint joins him. They’re still laughing when the rest of the Avengers walk into the floor and Natasha smacks the back of Clint’s head before dropping another container of take-out onto his lap. “Thanks, Nat.”

 

Steve and Thor joins them to eat again, and Bruce and Tony check the scans while Natasha watches Clint eat, like he’s gonna suddenly keel over if she takes her eyes off. Tony doesn’t know why he does it. He looks up from his own take-out container, stabs his chopsticks into Clint’s, and when Clint looks up, he grins. “Hey, Clint. Let’s date.”

 

He’s not expecting an answer because he’s never gotten one before. And they’re already pretty much dating anyway. Honestly, he was going to go back to his food. But Clint’s face splits open in a huge grin. “Okay,” he says, and goes back to eating his noodles, obviously unaware that he’d just thunderstruck Tony.

 

Natasha sniggers. “Is it official now?”

 

Bruce rolls his eyes. “If you two are officially dating now, can you please stop playing with each other’s feet under the dinner table? I can’t stretch my legs out without getting in the way.”


End file.
